


Away From the Spine

by osmiaavosetta



Category: Dishonored (Video Games), Transistor (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bone Charms (Dishonored), F/M, Grief/Mourning, Jessamine Kaldwin Lives, Mentor/Protégé, Music, Other, Swords, The Void, Whales, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-25 02:08:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30081864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osmiaavosetta/pseuds/osmiaavosetta
Summary: Washed down the river after an attempt on her life, Jessamine Kaldwin learns to carve runes into a whalebone sword.—One of the initial concepts for Transistor involved a fantasy tavern lady who wields a rune sword possessed by her murdered lover. Well, you know what else has runes and revenge and ruined cities and fancy swords and disembodied lovers and tragic romance?This is a Transistor-inspired Dishonored AU one-shot where Jessamine lives, but dear Corvo does not. It is very much set in the world of Dishonored, and the only crossover element is the bones (hehe) of the Transistor premise above. There are maybe two Transistor references sprinkled in, but I hope they blend well with the overall story.
Relationships: Corvo Attano/Jessamine Kaldwin, Jessamine Kaldwin/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7





	Away From the Spine

In her dreams, she plunges back into the water. The impact is as sharp and cold as the first time, when the struggle by the gazebo pitched her, still bleeding, over the stark walls of Dunwall Tower and into the churning Wrenhaven River. Every night, she swims toward the unearthly blue-violet light of a buoy and pulls herself onto a lone island of smooth gray stone.

In the distance, she sees golden lights winking like the lamps and fires of her city viewed from an opposite shore. In a way, she supposes, they could be. Sometimes, there is such a light on her island, she sees it has suggestions of a face, and it tells her its secrets. But, never with the voices she most longs to hear.

* * *

  
Mudlarks find her that first night, on the banks where the Wrenhaven has swept her, past the harbor, past Kingsparrow Island, and out of the city proper. The oldest boy — he can't be much older than Emily — gets her to cough up the river and then lean on his shoulder; he half-drags her to the carver's cottage on the quay. Firelight reveals her face — "It's the Empress! She looks just like on all the coin!" — and the carver, by blessed instinct, shushes them all.

"Let's not tell anyone, all right, Simon? Nettie? Jackie Boy? Let's keep it a secret for now. The Lady might be in some trouble."

And the children keep their mouths shut, of course, because they've all known a lady in trouble.

Deft hands, thread, and murmured chants close the wound where the assassin thrust his blade into her side — "Tsk, another inch or two to the left, Majesty, a little deeper, and we'd've been watching carriages with white flowers" — and soothed the knuckles that had met his jaw — "may the bastard's head ring like a bell for weeks, Majesty". But, nothing, nothing could be done for the hollow in her chest made by questions she couldn't voice herself.

"I bet the Princess is all right, Majesty. I bet your handsome Protector's got her all tucked in safe in the Tower."

Jessamine, weary from floundering, still tasting brine, barely manages a "Thank you" before falling, falling into the first dream of the water.

* * *

  
When she wakes, it is because the oldest boy — Simon, she remembers — has run in, out of breath, to tell them that soldiers and laborers are searching the banks for her body.

"I told Nettie and Jackie Boy not to say nothing first, Majesty. Shall I tell them you're here safe?"

Something — the apprehension in his dark eyes, so like Emily's, like Corvo's — makes her say, "No."

The carver, who calls herself Fen, gives her food, bathes her with wet rags, lends her clean clothes and, when the soldiers come knocking, presses a strange charm into her palm.

Jessamine freezes. Something about the set of their jaws, the twitching of their hands about the swords on their belts, tells her they've been tasked to return with her _body_. But, when they survey the room, their eyes seem to slide off her instead of meeting her gaze.

The sergeant — he makes sure they know he is a sergeant — barks at the women he sees inside. "Empress Jessamine Kaldwin was attacked by assassins and fell into the river. If you see any sign of her, anyone resembling the Empress, inform us at the guard post at once."

"Sure as day, sirs, I will," Fen says brightly. "Only, the post's all the way at the end of the quay, and you can see I'm not up for walking too far. And my poor sister here's laid up with the moon curse."

The sergeant wrinkles his nose. "Well, just — keep your eyes open."

Just as he turns to leave, Jessamine finds herself unable to resist.

"Emily — the Lady Emily — is she all right?"

"Missing," he says in surprise, as if just remembering she is there. "So if you ladies see her, let us know, too. Old Beaky Burrows is in charge for now."

"But, Cor– the Royal Protector — "

"Dead." At this, the soldier's face softens with quiet admiration. "Did his duty, and it still wasn't enough. Outnumbered, I'm told."

 _Dead._ Jessamine doesn't hear his parting instructions, or understand right then when Fen sends him off with false smiles, money, and one of the little charms. She hears only the hammering of her own heart.

* * *

  
Fen doesn't fuss over her. Instead, the carver spends the day at her table, which is cluttered with pieces of bone, bits of metal, lengths of wire, and tools that themselves look somewhat cobbled together. Her good leg is tucked up under her bad one, and she talks aloud when she isn't swaying and slipping in and out of a trance. Jessamine, too, comes and goes, from sleep to mourning to sleep again. These are merely long pauses in a largely one-sided conversation.

"This one's for a worker at one of the Pratchett canneries," Fen says. "She needs help staying awake for the extra shifts. Her children need elixir, the poor ducks."

And, "This one's for a boatman, comes here sometimes with sweets for the kids. This one's so the searchlights don't find him after curfew."

And, "This one's for a new girl at the Pearl Box. Can't have her fruiting now, can we? Plague's an awful time for it."

Jessamine thinks of the charm she used to hang on her bedpost, or hide in her secret desk. A trusted maid had gotten it for her, after telling her the secrets her mother would have told her if she hadn't died. Jessamine mislaid the charm one evening in the Month of Ice, and now, there is a ten-year-old girl with her face and Corvo's eyes.

Corvo. _Did his duty, and it wasn't enough._

"What did you give me, when the soldiers came?" she asks, then wonders if this is the first thing she has said to Fen since the night before.

Fen hums. "It's for a thief, but I'll make you your own one. It's so his face is forgotten, soon as you see it. Remind me, Majesty, if you please; he ought to pay me before I hand it over."

"Can you teach me?" Jessamine asks. She needs to go back to the city — to Emily! — but she doesn't want to be found. Not until she's ready. Not until her wounds are healed, of course. But also, not until she's sure this won't happen again.

The carver smiles. "We'll see if you have the ear for it."

"I thought it was a matter of reading and writing, carving the runes."

"Sure," Fen said, "for a pretty little trinket. Useful as the gold swirly bits on your buttons. Beg your pardon, Majesty, but there's a music to it. Anyone can learn the notes. Ain't everyone can make a song."

"I played the harp," Jessamine says earnestly. "I know how one builds chords out of scales."

Fen gives her a placating smile, but her stare is thoughtful. "We'll see."

* * *

  
The children come again in the evening with things Fen can work with, left on the banks by the current on its way from the factories and slaughterhouses. They come with mollusks, a small fish, and algae, and Fen makes it into a stew that warms all their bellies. With a loaf of bread Simon claims to have found, it is their only meal that day. They come with the news from the loudspeaker in the local square; the quay is not important enough to be in range.

"They're still looking for the Lady Emily, Miss Majesty," Jackie says, wiping his nose on the back of his hand. It's a Serkonan nose, Jessamine notes with a pang, but his accent is as Wharf Gristolian as they come. "If we find her first, we'll bring her here! She'll see then you ain't dead."

"Do people think I'm dead?" Jessamine asks. _Does Emily think I'm dead?_

The children shrug. "'S what they're saying, Majesty."

Already. All that backbone she's built up over the years, and her ministers still don't think she is strong enough.

"Why don't you tell the Watch you're alive?" Nettie asks. She is the smallest one, and so her gray eyes look the biggest. "Don't you want the Princess to find you?"

Jessamine fishes for an answer, even as her heart breaks for the girl's unspoken wish. She thinks of — longs for Emily, but she thinks of her ministers, too. She thinks of the circus of Parliament, hungry lions waiting for her to stumble. She thinks of the steely glint in the sergeant's eyes; he won't want to be a mere sergeant much longer. She thinks of the man in the red coat with the long scar on his face and a very, very sharp blade.

Before she can find the words, Simon simply says, "The bad ones who hurt the Majesty, they're still out there," and that is that.

* * *

  
In her dreams that night, silver threads spin themselves out of the air over her lonely rock. Jessamine hears a grieving whale. A word is spoken. She almost understands.

* * *

  
The witches come the next day, forcing Fen and Jessamine awake before dawn. Their skin is ashen, and they wear collars of roses or latticed vines, and armlets of thorns. Jessamine wants to dismiss them as play-acting kooks, but one of them has a walking corpse of a hound for a pet. Peaches, they call it.

They have an assortment of bones and a list of demands. In return, Fen receives a small purse and the promise of protection. Jessamine knows from years negotiating treaties that this is protection Fen never asked for but cannot decline.

"Our mistress says we will have a house soon," one of the witches says.

"A manor," another corrects. "She invites you to live with us there. We have carvers, too, but no one who knows the Wei-Ghon style. You can teach them. Maybe they can teach you. Proper trade, that'll be."

Fen wears the same smile she offered the sergeant the other day. "I'm honored, truly. But my work is best down here. I need to hear the strung-up whales when they're singing goodbye. Do the whales go by your manor?"

The witches frown, but they leave soon enough, promising to return in a few weeks.

* * *

  
After a simple porridge and a strange tea, Fen asks Jessamine to help her sort the bones. Jessamine isn't sure she wants to know where they are all from, but they are a myriad of shapes and sizes — vertebrae, ribs, digits, even the skull of what she hopes is a cat. Fen doesn't give her a system for sorting, so Jessamine assumes this is some sort of test.

Her mind drifts to the rehearsal she requests a week before her first official visit to Karnaca. She is still only the Princess, but Euhorn has been letting her take over more of his duties as his health declines. The audiograph is still in development; her staff searches all of Dunwall for native musicians until they find a fiddler and a guitarist in a dubious Serkonan cafe.

"You must teach me the steps, Corvo; it's your birthplace, after all," she says, an acceptable excuse for them to be so close. It has not yet been a year since their secret began. She is excited to see where he is from, with him to guide her, away from the eyes of the Dunwall court.

"I'm sorry, your Highness," he says. His eyes betray the smile he cannot form without arousing suspicion; his mouth makes only the faintest twitch. "I can lead you, but I don't know if I can teach you. We learn these dances by feel. We follow the music."

The guitarist nods.

"That's nonsense," Jessamine replies. She regrets it immediately. She hasn't even left Gristol, and she's already committed a cultural offense. "I mean," she attempts, "isn't that a stereotype?"

Corvo shrugs. "We're more than stereotypes, your Highness. Yet, there's truth in them, too. Here, give me your hand."

And, maybe it's the thrill at the base of her spine from the rumble in his voice, or the fact of his hand on her back, or how the brisk strums of the guitarist seem to drive her pulse, or the sense of trust that slowly grows as she tries to let Corvo lead, or the quiet laugh he lets slip when she does step and turn in time. But, Jessamine learns.

It's when she remembers the almost-kiss, the moment they remember they are not alone, that warmth surges at her touch when her hand closes around a bone. She nearly drops it.

"Hm." Fen looks up from her own work. "Bit of whale rib there. Supposed to be a witch's sword. I'm making several." She levels her eyes at Jessamine again. "I'll tell them it broke."

"What?"

"This one is your sword now."

* * *

  
Fen shows her how to shave the whalebone, to shape and trim it until it forms a deadly blade. Jessamine is a little frightened by the work, not because it is difficult — until now, her only calluses have been from gripping pens and plucking harp strings — but because it feels natural. There is an odd harmony building in her mind as the sword reveals itself to her — she who has come to believe, after decades of musical tutoring, that she is merely proficient, not creative. The sword thrums with the best song Empress Jessamine Kaldwin I will ever write, but only she can hear it, and not in her ears, but in her own fragile ribcage.

When she is not working on the sword, Jessamine learns the runes — the notes of the carver's scales. Fen makes her draw them, then practice with bits of driftwood, but the best, of course, is practice with the discarded scraps of actual bone. Fen makes her follow along as she fulfills her clients' orders, and Jessamine feels that she is being led in an unteachable dance. But, the movement is coming to her. She is learning. She is rehearsing for when the sword can make its debut.

The children bring them food and news. The boatman Fen spoke of comes to claim his charm, and he brings news, too. The lost Empress is presumed dead, and Lady Emily is still missing. Three days after his murder, there is a proclamation followed by ten minutes of silence in honor of Royal Protector Corvo Attano. A week from then, Empress Jessamine will have a funereal procession with a carriage laden with white flowers, but it will otherwise be empty.

The boatman says he feels compelled to search the banks anyway, when he doesn't have passengers. He claims to have a sense about these things. He doesn't like Lord Regent Burrows, whose hand seems to lie heavier and heavier on Dunwall with these quarantines, curfews, and unreasonable evictions. Wagons dump plague victims from the same rails that once carried goods from the other nations, whose blockade is in full force. The boatman wants the Empress Jessamine back, or even an Empress Emily.

"I bet that young girl has more sense than that old man, ain't that right, Nettie Doll? More heart, at least."

* * *

  
At night, when Jessamine pulls herself out of the water, the silver threads greet her. They drift about like jellyfish before weaving into the same shape each time. They chorus in some forgotten tongue, but she is learning, too, what they mean.

They sing of a Serkonan soldier, still somewhat a boy, not yet used to the Gristolian cold. They sing of helpless indulgence, the theft of apricot tartlets, paper boats folded out of drafted decrees, the first bestowments of trust; "I won't tell if you won't." They sing of companionship, a sort of comradeship through endless lessons, then court appearances and committee meetings, deepening with affection and time. They sing of unsanctioned boat rides in the pre-dawn light, the taste of crisp wine, and being rocked together, the Wrenhaven flowing and eddying around them. They sing of the birth of Emily, her indignant wails, her commanding grip, the certainty that she will rule everyone around her, crowned or not.

They sing regret, they sing sorrow; they sing a lament. " _I remember the breeze on my skin, and your touch._ "

Jessamine always wakes up crying.

* * *

  
The day of her empty funeral, she finishes the sword. Fen is silent and goes on a rare hobbled walk, not returning until dinnertime with the mudlarks in tow. Until then, all Jessamine hears is the water lapping at the quay.

That night, a golden thread weaves itself among the silver, and she understands.

She goes outside and takes a knife to the whalebone blade before sunrise. She carves the shape she has seen, a rune that Fen has not taught — cannot teach her; it is not one the carver knows. But, its song has been building in Jessamine's heart for twenty years.

When she is done, when light begins to spread from one end of the horizon to the other, she blows stray dust out of the grooves of the rune — gently, as with a newly treated wound.

" _Jess?_ "

For the first time in a long time, she laughs, though it is bittersweet. He sounds as though he has just awakened, has found himself on her pillow long after he'd intended to linger.

" _Morning, Jess. Looks like I'm still here._ "

* * *

  
It goes faster, after that. Each night, she swims for the buoy, climbs out of the water, and hears a new rune, and each morning before dawn, she carves it into the blade.

Fen inspects it afterward with interest and no small measure of pride.

"This one moves me across spaces and leaves a ghost in my wake," Jessamine explains. "This one lets me borrow another's visage for a time, like a mask. This one sends a foe flying, like they've put their hand in lit whale oil. This one — " she hopes she never needs this one, but she has carved it, because it was sung to her " — turns a body into ash as it dies."

"I know this one," Fen says. She uses her real smile. It is the rune from the thief's charm; this one, the Empress learned from her. "But what is this?"

Jessamine feels the warmth in her chest, and the sorrow.

"The heart of a living thing."

* * *

  
That night, she dreams not of runes, but of a bored, black-eyed youth who praises the work of her hands. He goads her across a chain of impossible stone islands that lead back to the Tower, and Jessamine is glad to prove her carving true. He shows her a line of faces and declares that all of them will, at one point or another, find themselves at the point of her sword. He shows her Emily, precious Emily, trying to bottle a secret letter for the Wrenhaven to carry.

"Will you restore things, make it all right again? Or will you send them all howling into the Void?" asks the black-eyed boy. "You've learned my scales and written a song, but I'm eager to see how you improvise, my dear Jessamine. It's time you returned to the city. Time to put on a show. You've made yourself quite the instrument."

The hilt of the sword is warm in her hand.

* * *

  
The boatman comes to Fen's cottage in the morning, and Jessamine knows it is time he sees her true face. He cries aloud in shock and relief. Of all the faces he sees in the water, hers is the one he has looked for the hardest. He offers to take her anywhere she needs to go.

Fen is not surprised, nor sad. She embraces Jessamine and rebuffs all offers of reward or compensation. She presses the handle of a newly made carving knife into the Empress's hand and kisses her cheeks in farewell. She makes Jessamine promise to keep her ears open. Jessamine vows, and also vows to herself that the carver and the mudlarks will live in comfort, even if they never leave the quayside nor see her again. For now, the imbalance remains.

* * *

  
She is clumsy and unsteady among the balconies and girders, with too many near misses and falls for her liking. Already, she has left a pile of ashes in her wake, and she is trying not to let this dishearten her.

Jessamine is making her way across the great bridge her father built, to visit a brilliant drunkard and philanderer who will, at least, tell her the truth. He will know where to find Emily, or perhaps where to start looking, or perhaps whom to ask. Whom not to ask, as well. She needs to believe this; there are very few men left in this world she can trust, and she is not even entirely sure of that.

When she thinks this, the voice in the bone sword chides her gently, and she takes some comfort in the thrum of runesong.

" _Just do me a favor_ ," he says. " _Don't let me go_."

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't tag them because doing so felt like spoilers. But, yes, those were Brigmore witches, that was Samuel, that was the Outsider, and Jess is now off to bug Sokolov.
> 
> The golden lights in the Void were spirits, like we see in DOTO.
> 
> Jessamine's Void powers, as determined by her runes, are Semblance, Displace with Distracting Visit, a version of Void Strike, and Shadow Kill.
> 
> The OC Ning Fen is from whatever region of Tyvia Shan Yun is from; I just guess Wei-Ghon based on real-world naming conventions. I really appreciated the NPC diversity of D2 and DOTO, and I wanted a little more representation of wherever-Shan-Yun-is-from. I just wish there was more lore on Tyvia that makes it out to be more than "Russia-but-also-Asia".
> 
> To expand the story summary a bit, the initial thought process behind this fic was pretty much, "I really enjoyed the [Bone Collectors fics](https://archiveofourown.org/series/628112) and that whole Witch!Carve-o Attano thing. Oh, you know what else is whalebone? Those swords the Brigmore witches carry. I wonder if they carve runes in them. Wait, you know what else has a kinda rune sword and a mostly silent protagonist and a dead lover? Transistor! Hey, what if we had Jessamine be Red?"
> 
> I must also credit [missdreawrites](https://archiveofourown.org/users/missdreawrites/pseuds/missdreawrites) and her Bone Collectors for some of the ideas behind carving (specially the forgetfulness charm). If you're familiar with that series, you can probably see inspiration from there all over this fic of my own.
> 
> The fic's working title was "Paper Boats on the Wrenhaven", but it didn't really fit in the end.


End file.
